Some time ago we reported on how an innovative teacher in Denmark, Stefan Nielsen, had set up a blog for students in his class to interact with other students around the world. Nielsen wrote an article, "Keyhole to the World" for schooldaysmagazine.com explaining how his program works and how it has grown in popularity to include the whole school, Vonslid. Nielsen highlighted the interactive blog's achievements and popularity with students and how students think that homework has suddenly become much more interesting.

Since then Oddizzi, a company in the UK started by a former primary school teacher, Jenny Cooke, has launched a program billed as Pen Pal 2.0, Pen Pal for the 21st Century.

Oddizzi’s ‘ClassPals’ featured purpose is to help children to share knowledge and experience of the world around them.

Oddizzi is growing in popularity and is now attracting schools from nineteen countries including New Zealand, Malaysia, China, Nepal, Mexico, USA, South Africa, Zambia.

Online Pen pals - Oddizzi says it offers children a safe enivronment to communicate with other children around the world.

A Safe Environment
ClassPals helps classrooms to link with each other nationally and internationally and offers a unique opportunity for subscriber schools to forge links with classes around the world in a safe and monitored environment.

Easy to Use
Oddizzi uses an online postcard format, that is quick and easy to use. Classes using ClassPals are able to communicate directly with each other and get first-hand knowledge of the world around them. From now on, communicating with other schools can be a daily rather than once in a while experience.

Primary School
A resource for primary school children, Oddizzi includes over 500 interactive pages of content, games that test global knowledge, interactive maps, live news feeds and a bank of creative lesson ideas and activities for teachers that take geography across the curriculum.

Jenny Cooke added, “As a school teacher for over 10 years, I saw how interested children were in the world but was frustrated by the lack of inspiring primary geography resources available. Giving young children the chance to communicate with others of their own age throughout the world means they can now learn from their peers rather than from traditional textbooks. Oddizzi is really practical and affordable and it is our aim that it provides a breakthrough for primary school children studying geography.”

Earlier this year, an Ofsted report concluded that the teaching of geography was not good enough in more than half of English state schools and that many teachers lacked specialist geographical knowledge.

A report by Oddizzi called ‘Geography Resources for Primary Teachers: the next step’ surveyed UK primary school teachers and found:

45% feel that the quality and relevance of resources currently available to them are impacting the teaching of geography

 

68% said that geography materials are significantly worse or not quite as good as materials available for other subjects

 

67% said that they are not or only somewhat satisfied with the level of interactivity of current materials

 

81% said that child friendly interactive maps would be a very interesting or essential feature of any new teaching resource (28% say it is essential)

 

70% say that the inclusion of cross curricular project ideas would be very interesting or essential as a feature of a new teaching resource (27% say it is essential)

Jacqueline Harding, child expert, former head teacher and government advisor said: "Oddizzi is a new experience in teaching geography and it recognises that it is the teacher's knowledge and passion which stimulates the imagination of children and allows them to flourish and succeed. Whilst the recent Ofsted paper places teachers in the driving seat of school improvement, this timely resource will equip them to achieve the vision for a transformed school curriculum. From seeing first-hand the positive reaction to Oddizzi from educators at BETT, I predict that this new resource will make a considerable contribution to children's learning on the global stage."

As featured above, Oddizzi is the new learning tool for primary schools that brings the world to life, and its ClassPals feature allows classrooms around the world to link with each other to forge links and share knowledge in a safe and monitored environment.